Feds threaten to cancel Medicare participation
Ravenswood CEO: Incident 'tragic in every way'
Nearly two weeks after a teen-ager died of gunshot wounds at Ravenswood Hospital in Chicago, the federal Department of Health and Human Services threatened to cancel the facility's Medicare participation. White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Ravenswood was notified its Medicare funding would end "unless the facility takes steps to ensure that the events that led to the tragic death of 15-year-old Christopher Sercye are never repeated again." Hospital officials immediately replied the facility was committed to meeting federal requirements.
Sercye was playing basketball with friends in a nearby alley when he was shot twice in the chest. His friends carried him to the bottom of a ramp about 35 feet from the emergency department (ED) door. Ravenswood is not a trauma center - the nearest is about two miles away - and staff likely would have been unable to work on the boy other than to stabilize him for transfer, news reports say.
The hospital's policy prohibited staff from leaving their duties to treat anyone outside, hospital spokeswoman Milli Striegl said after the incident. She said they did call 911: "Everything was done that should have been done."
Sercye needed immediate surgery to repair his aorta, said Cook County medical examiner Edmund Donoghue, MD. Two police officers repeatedly called for an ambulance to take him to a trauma center, said police spokesman Kevin Morison. Police also asked ED staff to come out and bring the boy inside, but they refused, citing hospital policy preventing them from leaving the facility. The police then brought Sercye inside, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later. About 15 minutes elapsed between the first police radio reports of the shooting and the time he was taken inside.
Doctors said the boy was severely wounded, and it was impossible to say whether he could have been saved if he had arrived at the ED earlier. Despite these circumstances, state and city officials are considering sanctions, including charges of patient-dumping.
(The preceding information came from news reports and press releases.)
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